The weblog of Norman Geras

April 30, 2005

I'm rounding up a number of recent links on the question of the AUT boycott decision. There's a statement here by Adam Logan, lecturer in Maths at the University of Liverpool:

I reject this resolution because it is connected with a movement that promotes the destruction of a sovereign, independent country; because it is inconsistent with the basic principles of academic freedom; because it is based on statements of fact which are incorrect, strongly contestable, or irrelevant; and because it was adopted by an undemocratic procedure.

Jocelyn Prudence, chief executive of the Universities and Colleges Employers' Association, said: "Early indications are that (the boycott) would appear to run contrary to contractual law, race and religious discrimination law, and academic freedom obligations that are built into the contracts of staff in pre-1992 universities."

For the first time in a working lifetime of trade union membership, I'm seriously tempted to tear up a union card...

I think I am probably in breach of the boycott at the moment - though I can't be sure because I have not yet received details from the AUT of what the boycott is to entail. Several of my students at City University are here on scholarships organised by the Olive Tree Educational Trust in collaboration with Israeli and Palestinian universities to foster dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians. It is a great scheme to which I am fully committed, and I'd rather leave the AUT than endanger it.

But it's not just my personal interest in this particular project that is making me think about resigning from the AUT. I'm against the boycott on principle and think that it's a disastrously stupid course of action to pursue.

Chris Fox, lecturer in Computer Science at Essex University, told The Jerusalem Post that the 25 signatures by AUT local association members required to submit a motion calling for the repeal of the boycott resolutions were being collected.

The motion would be heard in an emergency national meeting. Fox said that if the executive failed to call such a meeting, the AUT could expect further resignations.

"I will be resigning in the next few days if the national executive of the union fails to indicate an intention to act directly to reconsider or rescind the boycott," said Fox, adding that "many people here have resigned from the union."

Michael Green of Cambridge University, one of the world's leading physicists, is one of the members who resigned from AUT. "I would condemn many actions of Israel's government," Green told Haaretz, "but (a boycott) contradicts academic freedom." He called the decision "outrageous," saying it exceeded the agenda of a trade union. "Why is such a step taken against Israel, and not applied to many places in the world, such as Russia, for its policy in Chechnya?" Green said three or four other people told him they would resign from AUT as a result of the boycott.

The higher education system does not operate in a vacuum. It needs not only congresses and sabbatical years. It is in much more urgent need of international contacts, publication in various countries, confirmation and scientific inspiration from important colleagues. In effect, it is not the universities in England that will now boycott Israel. The universities will, if they wish, continue to invite talented Israelis to lectures, sabbaticals and doctoral studies. The AUT - in acceptance committees for publications and congresses, and everything that is essential for the existence of freedom of expression, research and academic development - will be the one to distinguish between the "collaborators with the authorities" (for example, anyone who was in the army or whose son was in the army?) and people who are "all right," and thus they will create a new ranking of who will succeed in penetrating the international community, and who will be forced to make do with expressing himself in Hebrew only.

Meanwhile, Engage has carried a second post (for the first, see here) disagreeing with the view that Jewish academics should resign from the AUT. I would like to comment.

Speaking for myself - though my guess is that this view would be shared by others who have resigned - I have said more than once that there are different ways of opposing the boycott decision, with resignation only one of these. Applying pressure and registering protest from outside is another, and fighting within the AUT to get the decision reversed another. I've also said that I can see why there will be people who choose not to resign, and that I respect their reasons. On the other hand, those at Engage who disagree with resignations by Jewish members make no concession whatever - not in anything they've so far said - to why some Jewish academics might feel that they don't want, even temporarily, to stay in an organization publicly committed to an anti-Semitic policy. I have to say, for all that the work now being done by Engage is crucial, which is why I support it, I find this reaction narrow, and I would even go so far as to say cramped. Members of a minority (ethnic, religious, etc.) whose union has adopted a policy they see as prejudicial to their interests or identity and who choose to stay in and fight against it - well, that is their right. But it shouldn't take too much imagination or experience of the world to grasp why some others may not find this either congenial or dignified.

It is also interesting that Engage should twice have seen fit to make a statement against Jewish resignations, a statement directed at people actively supporting the effort to get the AUT decision reversed, when one might have thought they should be focusing this energy on more relevant targets: on opponents in fact; people who have hijacked their union in the service of a noxious policy.

Still, the effort of Engage is to be applauded and actively supported. There are different and complementary ways of fighting, and this is a common battle.

Baghdad, April 29 - U.S. investigators have exhumed the remains of 113 people - all but five of them women, children or teenagers - from a mass grave in southern Iraq that may hold at least 1,500 victims of Saddam Hussein's campaign against the Kurdish minority in the 1980s, U.S. and Iraqi officials said this week.

The recovered bodies are expected to be among the evidence used against the deposed Iraqi president by prosecutors at a special tribunal, investigators said.
.....
Investigators said that women and children were forced to stand at the edge of the pits, then shot with AK-47 assault rifles. Casings were found near the site, they said.

"They sprayed people with bullets so they fell back" into the graves, Iraq's human rights minister, Bakhtyar Amin, told reporters.

Women and children forced to stand at the edge of pits. Remind you of anything? There's been rather a lot of talk lately about people having to hold their noses to vote in a certain way. Well, when you read or hear such talk you may want to hold your nose.

Here's a reason - sorry, another reason - not to vote Conservative or in any way that risks letting the Tories back in. Geoffrey Robertson:

There is one breach of international law that really is at stake in this election... It is threatened by the Conservative manifesto promise to withdraw from the 1951 Geneva convention on the status of refugees. No other UN covenant has made so many lives worth living or protected desperate people so effectively against torture and death. Britain was among the first of 145 countries (including the US) to ratify this convention and protocol, which it helped to draft; elect Mr Howard, and Britain will be the first to renounce it - with consequences that his party does not appear to understand.

The convention does no more - but no less - than establish in international law the most basic principle of humanity and of every faith. This principle is, quite simply, that no state can expel from its territory any persons likely to be murdered or maltreated at their destination for reasons of race or religion or politics.

How could any responsible political party denounce that law?
.....
Mr Howard thinks that refugees are acceptable in small and precise numbers and envisages that his government would set an "annual quota"; once it is filled, any genuine refugees who arrive will be summarily extirpated. Men, women and children, gripped by genuine and well-founded terror, will be forcibly taken to planes and trains and ferries and sent back to countries where they will, in many cases, not be heard from again.

... The convention and its protocol have been ratified by so many nations that the rule now qualifies as a "norm" of international law, applicable to every country in the world. It is arguably a crime against humanity, today, for a government minister to order status-confirmed refugees back to a place of persecution.

Percy Heath died yesterday at the age of 81; he would have been 82 today. There are notices here and here. There was a time when it was thought very uncool to like the Modern Jazz Quartet; by some it maybe still is. Too bad. I liked them from (what was for me) the off. Today I've been listening to Pyramid, one of the first jazz albums I owned, and Dedicated To Connie.

It had to happen so it's happening. I'm running a book on the result of Thursday's general election. Here's what you need to do. Send me an email with (1) the winning party, (2) the size of its overall majority, and (3) the number of seats obtained by it.

The winner - of the normblog poll, that is - will be determined in the first instance by correct answers to (1) and (2), or if no one gets (2) right, then by the prediction which is closest. (3) is there only as a tie-breaker should one be needed.

Prize: honour and a £30 book token, or donation of the same amount to a charity of your choice.

April 29, 2005

Over at Engage today, David Seymour has a post opposing the call for Jewish members of the AUT to resign. David doesn't name anybody in particular who has issued that call, but as I am someone who did - even though I have also made it plain that I understand, respect and indeed agree with many of the reasons of those who choose to stay and attempt to get the boycott decision reversed from within - and as some of David's arguments are weak, or in one case worse than weak, I want to comment on them. David writes:

[1] First, the claim that the boycott makes the AUT an antisemitic institution is akin to the argument that the illegal occupation of Palestine, along with the racist policies adopted there, makes of Israel an 'apartheid' state. [2] Correspondingly, as with the AUT's boycott, the proposed resignations ensure that those making the call eschew all responsibility for the resolution of these complex and difficult matters. The consequence of this neglect is that those channels of communication and democratic procedures that permit dialogue and discussion, as well as a change of policy, are left in abeyance - like those between Israeli and Palestinian academics - thereby unraveling years of difficult, determined and principled work.

[3] It is also to be remembered that it is in the very nature of antisemitism to reduce the social and political world to a conflict between 'the Jews' and 'non-Jews' (whatever these terms may mean). Read in this way, the call for resignation of 'Jewish' academics replicates the antisemitism that, despite all good intentions by those involved, inheres within the AUT boycott. It reduces both the Israel/Palestine conflict and the manner it is addressed in our union to a conflict between Jews and non-Jews at the expense of rational discourse. And, in a final irony, if the call for resignation were to be successful it would make of the AUT the only judenrein Union in Britain; thereby offering antisemitism a premature and unnecessary victory.

[4] Finally, it is also important to fight against antisemitism in ways that do not accept and perpetuate its terms of reference. [Numbers in square brackets have been added by me. I have also corrected a repeated typo on 'antisemitism'.]

As to [1], there may be some who have claimed that the AUT is an anti-Semitic institution, but I haven't, and nor is it necessary to think that it is anti-Semitic in order to feel that you want, as a Jew, to resign from it. That the organization is presently committed by its recent decision to an anti-Semitic policy (which is all that I, for my part, have said) is sufficient cause - or so I think anyway. I would also put on record that my own experience within the AUT is not - remotely - such as to suggest that the organization has been an anti-Semitic one, and I not only hope, I also confidently believe, that it will soon demonstrate this by reversing the boycott decision.

As to [2], the claim that 'those making the call [for Jews to resign] eschew all responsibility for the resolution of these complex and difficult matters' is simply and self-evidently false. It assumes that the only way to influence what happens within an organization is by staying inside it. But that isn't so. What now happens in the AUT will depend on many things: this includes the efforts currently being made by some of its members, but it also includes the reactions of people outside it, and the responses of those who have been members but are now leaving in dismay or disgust. Speaking personally, I am not well-disposed, just at this moment and given how I've been spending my time, towards the charge of 'eschew[ing] all responsibility'.

As to [3] and [4] - the replicating anti-Semitism or perpetuating its terms of reference stuff, and at the expense of rational discourse - this is, frankly, wretched for anyone seeking to write in a careful way on a sensitive topic. If there has been a flight from rational discourse by any of those resigning or calling for resignation, then say and show where. And say and show, on the other thing, where there was an implication by anyone that the issue of the boycott boiled down to a battle between Jews and non-Jews - as if someone (so far unnamed) might have assumed that the boycott decision will have been repugnant to Jews only, something which has already been seen to be widely false; as if there haven't been appeals to everyone in the AUT to help overturn this shameful decision. The qualification about good intentions notwithstanding, this replicating charge would have been better left out.

Many people are not aware that the Geneva-based International Red Cross and Red Crescent Federation has always refused to admit the Israeli branch, the Magen David Adam (i.e., Red Star of David) to full membership. Various pretexts, excuses, and complications have been invoked over the years, but essentially this is a matter of politically motivated exclusion - which, as far as I know, is unique to Israel. (Purely coincidence, no doubt.) The American Red Cross, to its credit, has taken the lead in pressing for an end to this indefensible situation. Dr Bernadine Healy, the former head of the American Red Cross, provided important moral leadership on this issue, despite considerable criticism and opposition.

It seems possible (though it's far from certain) that the international Federation may, at long last, do the right thing. If so, it's about time.

Opposition by Red Crescent branches from Islamic countries, including but not restricted to the Arab world, has always been the decisive factor preventing the inclusion of Israel. It is now more than a half-century since the creation of Israel, and it is time for these countries to come to terms with Israel's existence - not to endorse Israel's policies, or even necessarily to make peace with Israel (if that seems too radical), but just to accept its existence. If they can't bring themselves to do this, then at least the international Red Cross/Red Crescent organization should do so. (Jeff Weintraub)